Senior Production Engineer — Live Video & Scale

Whatnot; Los Angeles (CA); Remote; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible Time off policy

Health Insurance options

Work From Home Support

Parental Leave

Job summary

Whatnot is a premier live commerce platform seeking a Production Engineer who embeds with product, platform, and infrastructure teams to improve reliability and scale. You will own critical paths where milliseconds matter, from live video to bidding, with a focus on observability and cross-team collaboration.

You will join an early embedding effort across services, shaping how production engineering operates at scale, with opportunities to influence architectures and tooling across AWS/GCP,

Qualifications

• 9+ years building and debugging production services at scale.
• Experience embedded with product, platform, and infrastructure teams.
• Strong systems and distributed systems fundamentals.
• Fluency across languages and cloud-native environments (AWS/GCP) with Kubernetes and infrastructure as code.
• Bonus: high-traffic, real-time, or live streaming systems.

Responsibilities

• Go deep with the embed team to raise reliability, performance, and scalability and write the code to get there.
• Hunt anomalies across traffic, latency, error, and cost signals and trace root cause across services.
• Connect operational signals to business impact for meaningful degradations and cohorts.
• Work on critical areas: payments, live video, search, bidding path, and security.
• Prepare for peak events with capacity modeling, load testing, and failure drills.
• Improve observability to catch next anomaly in minutes, not quarters.
• Put AI to work on operations: anomaly detection, on-call assistance, remediation, toil reduction.
• Share on-call and lead incident response for cross-team failures.

Skills

Production engineering

Distributed systems

Observability

Cloud-native

Python

Elixir

Go

AWS

GCP

Kubernetes

Terraform

Tools

Kubernetes

Terraform

Cloud tooling

Job description

Whatnot is a premier live commerce platform seeking a Production Engineer who embeds with product, platform, and infrastructure teams to improve reliability and scale. You will own critical paths where milliseconds matter, from live video to bidding, with a focus on observability and cross-team collaboration.

You will join an early embedding effort across services, shaping how production engineering operates at scale, with opportunities to influence architectures and tooling across AWS/GCP,